There now is a trend to make it optional for sperm donors to allow contact by offspring: Sweden, Holland, the United Kingdom and parts of Australia have eliminated anonymous gamete donations.
Pratten maintained it's important to know her medical and social history in order to properly form her sense of identity.
She asked the court to impose a permanent injunction prohibiting the destruction of medical records of anonymous donors.
Although she had a mother and father while growing up, Pratten felt she was missing an important part of her background because she has been unable to learn anything more than the basic physical details about her biological father.
Her parents could not have children so they turned to a Vancouver clinic operated by Dr. Gerald Korn.
Korn, who retired in 2002 and is in his 80s, artificially inseminated Pratten's mother using donated sperm. Korn said he had the records in 2002 that Pratten sought, but later said they were destroyed.
Leah Greathead, the lawyer representing B.C.'s attorney-general, argued the privacy rights of anonymous sperm donors should outweigh the constitutional rights of donor offspring.
She pointed out that the federal government has already enacted legislation, the Assisted Human Reproduction Act, to regulate gamete donors and to create a national sperm bank.
The lawyer said that act, at the time the Pratten case was argued in court last September, wasn't fully in effect after a Quebec legal challenge, which was heard in April 2009 by the Supreme Court of Canada, and the decision was still pending.
She suggested Pratten's legal action was premature because of the pending ruling to determine whether the issue falls under federal or provincial jurisdiction.
(On Dec. 22, 2010, the Supreme Court of Canada rendered a divided 4-4-1 decision, striking down portions of the act.)
Greathead argued that if the B.C. Supreme Court judge did strike down B.C.'s Adoption Act, the effect should be suspended for more than a year to allow the government time to draft new legislation. Arvay suggested the suspension period should be six months.
Pratten's mother, Shirley Pratten, said earlier that the provincial and federal governments have failed to preserve the medical records of children born through gamete donors, creating a lost generation of kids.
She has made submissions to House of Commons and Senate committees since 1985, trying to win for her daughter the same rights as offspring who are adopted.
A study from the Commission on Parenthood's Future found children conceived by sperm donation are more likely to suffer from isolation and depression, and are roughly twice as likely as biological children to struggle with substance abuse.
Such children have a unique and often isolating relationship to themselves that others may not fully understand, the study found. |
發表於 2011-5-19 19:49
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